Gwen L. Allen

is Assistant Professor of Art History at San Francisco State University, where she specializes in modern and contemporary art, art criticism, and visual culture. She is the author of Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (MIT Press, 2011).

Anne Ayres

is retired and lives in Eugene, Oregon. She was Director of Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design (1988-2003) and Associate Curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art) (1985-88). Her exhibitions and catalogue essays focus on California art, with emphasis an on Los Angeles. Ayres holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Southern California.

Claire Barliant

is a writer and freelance editor based in Brooklyn. She writes art reviews for Time Out New York, Artforum, and Art in America, as well as the “Goings On About Town” section of the New Yorker, and has contributed essays to numerous catalogues. She is currently a master lecturer at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Jennifer Bolande

has, since 1980, been engaged in an intuitive form of conceptualism exploring emotional, linguistic and physical relations to the world through photography, sculpture, movement, film, and installation. Bolande’s art is exhibited in major institutions and private collections around the world. She currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA.

Ruth Bowman

is an art historian, educator and critic, specializing in 19th and 20th Century American painting, sculpture and architecture.  Her contribution to the arts has spanned over 40 years, beginning in the early 1960s at the Jewish Museum.  She was a curator of the New York University Art Collection, founder of the Grey Art Gallery, staff lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art, Director of Education for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and contributed a multi-lecture course art on 20th century American art to the “Sunrise Semester,” a distance-learning program broadcast on CBS from 1957 to 1982. In 2002, The National Portrait Gallery acquired the Ruth Bowman and Harry Kahn 20th Century American Self-Portrait Collection. Ruth's many interviews with artists and art historians are housed at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Audrey Chan

is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Afterall Online, Art21 Blog, and …might be good. Her first book, Conseil juridique et artistique / Legal and Artistic Counsel (2011), concerns the relationship between art and politics in French law.

Brody Condon

is an artist based in New York. His work has been exhibited worldwide in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

Catherine Corman

is the editor of Joseph Cornell’s Dreams (2007), and her essay on Joseph Cornell and silence was anthologized in Sound Unbound (2008). Her book of photographs, Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City, was included in the 2009 Venice Biennale. Her writing has also appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and Vogue Italia, and on the websites of The Paris Review, The Economist and McSweeney’s.

Leslie Dick

has taught in the Art Program at CalArts since 1992.  She writes about art for X-tra and other journals, and recently she has taken part in collaborative art projects, notably the video Ripcord (2008), with Martin Kersels and Mark Wheaton.  In April 2010, she presented a multi-media performance of Jacques Lacan's essay on The Mirror Stage at the Whitney Museum, New York.

Joanna Fiduccia

is a critic based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in periodicals including Artforum, Spike, ART LIES, MAP and Kaleidoscope, where she is Associate Editor. She is currently a Dickson Fellow in the UCLA Department of Art History.

Harry Gamboa, Jr.

co-founded Asco (Spanish for nausea), the East L.A.-based conceptual-performance art group active from 1972-1987. He has authored several books and his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He is a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts, School of Art, Program in Photography and Media.  

Bruce Hainley

is the author of No Biggie, Foul Mouth, and, with John Waters, Art--A Sex Book.  A contributing editor of Artforum and East of Borneo, he teaches in the MFA Program at Art Center College of Design.  The fifth (and most recent) issue of Pep Talk is dedicated to his work.

Dick Hebdige

has published extensively on popular culture, media and critical theory and contemporary art, music and design. He is the author of three seminal books on art and popular culture: Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979); Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (Methuen, 1987); and Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (Routledge, Methuen, 1988). Hebdige is a professor in the Art and Film & Media Studies Departments at UC Santa Barbara and is the Director of the University of California institute for Research in the Arts Desert Studies Project, an arts-based research and teaching program centered on California's Mojave and Sonoran deserts.

Michael Ned Holte

is a critic based in Los Angeles. He writes regularly for Artforum International and has contributed to periodicals such as Afterall, Domus, Frieze, Interview, Pin-Up, and X-Tra. He is currently Visiting Artist Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts.

Paul Karlstrom

is an American art specialist and cultural biographer who received his B.A. in English literature from Stanford and his M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from UCLA. For thirty years the West Coast Regional Director of the Archives of American Art, Karlstrom maintains his long art-world association through extensive writing and interviewing. He has conducted hundreds of interviews with artists ranging from John McLaughlin, Helen Lundeberg, Beatrice Wood, and George Herms to Ed Ruscha, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Nathan Oliveira for the Smithsonian’s research collections. Editor of On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950, he is author of the forthcoming (January 2012) biography of legendary modernist art historian and museum director Peter Selz. His current projects include the biographical chapter for a Hassel Smith monograph and an interview series devoted to Bruce Conner’s life and times.

Norman M. Klein

writes primarily on consumer spectacle and how confused urban planning hides social conditions. He is the author of History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, Vatican to Vegas, and The Imaginary 20th Century, forthcoming in November 2011. He is a professor at California Institute of the Arts.

Christopher Knight

is art critic for the Los Angeles Times. A three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism (1991, 2001 and 2007), Knight received the 1997 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association, the first journalist to win the award in more than 25 years. He has appeared on "CBS 60 Minutes," the "PBS News Hour," National Public Radio and in the 2009 documentary movie, "The Art of the Steal." In 1999 Knight was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Atlanta College of Art.

Jennifer Krasinski

has written on the subject of art, film and video for numerous publications such as Frieze, Modern Painters, Art In America, Spike, Bidoun, East of Borneo and N+1 Film Review.  Her experimental fiction has appeared in journals such as Punk Planet, Joyland, Frozen Tears, and MYTHM, edited by Trinie Dalton.  She is the author of Prop Tragedies (Wrath of Dynasty Press, 2010), and is an adjunct faculty member at the Art Center College of Design in both the Graduate Fine Art and Media Design Programs.  She has also taught at New York University and the University of Southern California. She is a graduate of Vassar College, The Courtauld Institute of Art and Art Center College of Design.

Quinn Latimer

is a poet and critic based in Basel, Switzerland. Her poems have been featured in Boston Review, The Paris Review, and Seneca Review, among other journals. Rumored Animals, her first book of poetry, recently won the 2010 American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and will be published in 2011. She also regularly contributes art and literary criticism to Art in America, Artforum.com, ArtReview, and Frieze.

Thomas Lawson

is editor-in-chief of East of Borneo, and an artist, educator and writer. His essays have appeared in such journals as Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, frieze and October, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. From 1979 until 1992 he, along with writer Susan Morgan, published and edited REALLIFE Magazine, an irregular publication by and about younger artists interested in the relationship between art and life.  From 2002 until 2009 he was US editor of Afterall, an international art journal then co-published by Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, and the Art School at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. A book of his selected writings, Mining for Gold, was published by JRP-Ringier, Zurich in 2004, and an anthology of work from REALLIFE Magazine was published by Primary Information, New York, in 2007.

Annette Leddy

writes on art and literature. She has published catalog essays on Larry Bell, William Leavitt, and Allan Kaprow, and journal essays on writers such as Angelo Rognoni and Jorge Luis Borges. For the Getty Research Institute, she co-curated "Tumultuous Assembly: Visual Poems of the Italian Futurists" (2006) and she is currently co-curating an exhibition about artists and writers in 1940s Mexico. She received a 2009 Arts Writers grant from the Warhol Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2009 Frieze Writers Prize.  

Jon Leon

is a Los Angeles-based writer. He is the author of The Hot Tub (Mal-O-Mar Editions, 2009), Hit Wave (Kitchen Press, 2008), Alexandra (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008), and The Artists Editions 2006-2010. In 2010 he founded Legacy Pictures, specializing in custom-run editions of fine writing.

Tom Marioni

is an artist whose work has been shown internationally since 1963. 

Derek McCormack

lives in Toronto. His latest novel is The Show That Smells (Little House on the Bowery/Akashic Books).

Meghann McCrory

is an artist based in Los Angeles.  Her recent body of work explores paradise and utopia as aesthetic vocabularies that reflect and shape our relationship to technology and the landscape.  She graduated from Wellesley College in 2001 and earned her MFA from CalArts in 2009.  

Paul McMahon

is a multi-tasking non-careerist whose current vocations include artist, musician, writer, comedian, producer, minister, mailman and single father of nine year old twin girls. He lives in Woodstock and his work was included in the "Pictures Generation 1974-1984" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2009. His website is www.paulmcmahon.tv.

Susan Morgan

has written extensively about art, design, and popular culture. The author of Joan Jonas: I Want to Live in the Country and Other Romances, she is currently editing a Los Angeles-themed collection of writing by Esther McCoy (1904-1989), the pre-eminent voice of West Coast modernist architecture, to be published by East of Borneo in 2011.

Robert C. Morgan

is an American art historian, critic, abstract painter, and curator. He holds both an MFA in Sculpture and a PhD in Art History and Aesthetics. In 1999, he was awarded the Premiere Arcale award in Salamanca, Spain, in international art criticism and was recently inducted into the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg, Austria. Author of many books and exhibition catalogs on contemporary art, translated into many languages (including Farsi, Finnish, Polish, Hebrew, and Chinese), he is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology and currently teaches in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

Chon Noriega

is Professor in the UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media. He is author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (Minnesota, 2000) and editor of nine books dealing with Latino media, performance and visual art. In 2002, he became Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. He is currently co-curating four concurrent exhibitions on Chicano art as part of the upcoming Pacific Standard Time initiative in Los Angeles.

Saul Ostrow

is the Art Editor for BOMB Magazine and the Chair of Visual Arts and Technologies at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He was co-editor of Lusitania Press (1996-2004) and editor of the book series "Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture" published by Routledge, London. Since 1987 he has curated over 70 exhibition in the US and abroad. His writings have appeared in numerous art magazines, journals, catalogs, and books in the US and Europe. He regularly writes for Art in America.

Corrina Peipon

is an artist, writer, and curator living in Los Angeles. 

Judith Olch Richards

is an independent writer and curator, and has to-date interviewed over 40 artists for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art's Oral History Program. She is the former executive director of Independent Curators International (ICI) where she produced over 75 traveling exhibitions and exhibition catalogues and authored the book Inside the Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York (2004), distributed by D.A.P.

Moira Roth

is an art historian, writer and playwright, and holds the Trefethen Chair of Art History at Mills College in Oakland. Since the early 1970s she has been involved in performance history and feminism, and from the 1980s onward, she has worked cross-culturally, and internationally. Her first volume of collected essays, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, was published in 1998, and currently she is at work on her second volume, Traveling Companions/ Fractured Worlds. For the last ten years, in addition to two ongoing fictional narratives—about (1) Rachel Marker, a 110-year-old Czech Jew, and (2) The Library of Maps and its inhabitants—Roth has written a series of plays that have been produced in the US and elsewhere. Among them are Amaterasu, The Blind Woman and Hiroshima, and From Vietnam to Hollywood. Currently she is also the blogger for the 18th Biennale of Sydney: Moira Roth’s Gleanings.

Barry Schwartz

Cameron Shaw

is a writer based in New Orleans. She is a 2009 recipient of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program for Short-Form Writing.

Howard Singerman

is the author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999) and the forthcoming Art History, After Sherrie Levine, both from the University of California Press. He has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues, among them the retrospective surveys of Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, and Allen Ruppersberg. His essays and criticism have appeared in a number of journals and magazines including Artforum, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Parkett.  He is currently associate professor of art and art history at the University of Virginia.

Jenni Sorkin

is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History and Critical Theory at the University of Houston.

Nick Stillman

teaches art history at the University of New Orleans and writes about baseball.

Darcy Tell

is editor of the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art Journal and author of the award-winning book Times Square Spectacular (2008), a visual history of Times Square. 

Kate Wolf

is a writer living in Los Angeles, where she's an editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and of a newspaper, Night Papers.